Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act

Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act

This bill addresses various public land concerns in Malheur County in Oregon.

The bill directs the Department of the Interior to prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement for certain federal land in the county. Interior shall develop plans for areas that are ecologically degraded or most at risk of being ecologically degraded. Interior shall establish the Malheur Community Empowerment for Owyhee Group, which shall, among other things, use such statement to review projects proposed to the Bureau of Land Management by group members, ranchers holding grazing permits on the federal land, or other members of the public.

The bill also

• establishes a network to monitor such land,
• designates 1,133,481 acres of federal lands in the county as wilderness and components of the National Wilderness Preservation System,
• designates a 14.7-mile segment of Owyhee River as a recreational river,
• establishes improvements for certain loop roads,
• requires separate feasibility studies concerning Owyhee Reservoir,
• requires improvements to existing Oregon State Parks and private camps on the shore of the Reservoir,
• establishes a dude ranch at Birch Creek,
• requires a feasibility study on a specified rails-to-trails project,
• requires a feasibility study on marketing communities or portions of the county as the Gateway to the Oregon Owyhee,
• requires a determination of the use and conditions under which the Jordan Valley Airstrip may be used to support firefighting,
• establishes the Native Seed Center as the primary federal native seed repository in the Western States, and
• requires that land be taken into trust for the benefit of the Burns Paiute Tribe.